Women Are Never Going to Cover Themselves Enough to Get Men to Shut Up About Us

A charitable reframing of an obnoxious conversation

Photo by Brando Makes Branding on Unsplash

Part 1: This Section is Adapted from a Twitter Thread I Wrote Several Years Ago In Response to a Pastor Worrying that Women Posting Pictures of Themselves With Their Infants After Birth On Facebook was Immodest

The conversation about what women should or shouldn’t wear for the sake of our scrupulous boy neighbors is a conversation that hasn’t informed my life in years and I’ve been fortunate to be in churches that don’t participate in it. However, after a year and a half of working in young women’s ministry, and seeing the materials that are forming them, I see the conversation is still ongoing. In fact, it actually seems to be making a bit of a resurgence among influencer culture geared at Gen Z on platforms like Instagram and Tiktok.

To be honest, talking about the “modesty” discussion always makes me feel profoundly embarrassed, because I imagine my Duke professors or my friends in Episcopalian churches reading this and thinking, “Oh my gosh, Laura is surrounded by creeps.” That’s not quite it, but I do think I have been exposed to, and have since ministered to, women who emerge from more traditional Christian spaces where the conversation about what women should or shouldn’t wear is a highly moralized conversation. It’s sometimes framed in terms of “self respect” (ie, women who dress less conservatively don’t respect themselves, I guess) but the dominant model is on the specific concern that women’s clothes causes men to sin. I.e., men will look at women and have sexual feelings for them, and while men are ultimately responsible for themselves, women should make things a little easier and not dress in a way that will lead men to noticing them sexually.

Here’s the thing, though. This is never going to happen.

One thing I learned really quickly as I got older and started meeting people from other countries is that things that seem really obvious to you aren't obvious at all and someone had to teach you the rules. For instance, the idea that women should wear shirts. After meeting Christians from the Global South, I learned a lot of them grew up with parents and grandparents who remembered women going around shirtless just like men did.

Does this mean everyone in these cultures was incredibly turned on at all times? No. One consequence of topless women being no big deal and a normal sight was that people didn't really fetishize breasts the same way we do. It was just another part of the body. I think this illustrates something that I've seen to be true from my own experience growing up in a purity culture.

Here it is: modesty regulations and purity ideals aren't actually a response to what straight men are inherently like. Instead, they shape straight men's experience of what sexuality is. If you grow up with non-sexualized nudity, there's a better chance you'll be able to distinguish between bodies in sexual situations and bodies not in sexual situations and respond appropriately. If you grow up in settings where the female body is a permanent site of surveillance, anxiety, fascination, control, and (frequently) property disputes, responding appropriately to women is going to be much harder for you.

When I remember getting sexually harassed in churches as a younger woman you could absolutely see the effects that surveillance-based purity culture had on the men in those churches. A shirt is close to being acceptable but is slightly low in one spot. A skirt that was fine when you were standing up is sexual when sitting down - or the other way around. Your clothes were fine but then you picked something up and now you are standing in a sexual way even though your clothes were fine. All this required comment and critique, because The Rules were the line of what was sexual or not.

So I think it's only fair to warn you guys if your church wants to be really counterculture and expand purity restrictions to be even stricter and even broader - ie, women should not be seen in workout clothes, swimsuits, hospital gowns, while nursing babies, etc - you are absolutely driving the bus the wrong way. As The Rules become longer and more consuming, being on the wrong side of them becomes more and more eroticized. Today it's nursing moms, but tomorrow it'll be women holding babies, because babies make men think about nursing and nursing makes them think about breasts (if you think I'm exaggerating, remind me to tell you the story of the time I was reprimanded for hanging a swimsuit to dry where boys could see it at church camp). The rules create the fetish, not the other way around.

For us, making sure we followed the rules, and noticing and pointing out and sexualizing us when we didn't, became the new fetish. You can't make a rule that's strict enough to undo that.

Women from Christian and other really patriarchal circles like to catalogue ridiculous things they've been told to not do or wear for the sake of modesty, and I get it because it's fun to commiserate and laugh at. I also think it's why it's inevitable there will be a lot of commotion over men frankly showing their asses by revealing that they find pictures of immediately postpartum moms holding their babies unbearably erotic, or entering Year Ten of having months-long consuming thoughts about yoga wear. I think oxygen and attention for the ass-show-ers is ultimately counterproductive and I don't think reasonable people need to be persuaded that women shouldn't, among other things, eat hot dogs, wear dark colored underwear, give face to face hugs, have their mouths open for any reason, exercise where their fathers can see them, or whatever new thing your inexplicably respected local pervert warns has recently made him horny.

But I do think these absurd occasions, and their long history in American public discourse, are outstanding examples of how modesty is less a code and more an arms race between men who want to leer and women who don't want to be leered at. The field of what becomes immodest gets wider and wider as the explicitly sexual is taken out of the public sphere, and the onlookers expand their field of consumption to include the nonsexual, the implied, the suggested, and the reminiscent. Once you keep socializing younger and younger boys into this model and heavily supplement with porn, it's not hard to see why no one feels seen, valued, or respected in this situation. We're basically left with a lot of neurotic men insisting that this time more deference to their dysfunction will help, and women who have had enough.

It's because the rules aren't helping. And honesty, if you’ve read Galatians and Romans, it shouldn’t be surprising the rules are not helping.

2. On Sexually Restraining Your Language in Public

The classic clap-back Christian women give to a Christian man complaining about women wearing clothes is this: sounds like you need to gouge out your eye, control yourself, this is a you problem.

And they’re right. But I’d like to add another point to that. What if modesty and keeping sexuality out of public spaces is also about the way we talk?

So this is a statement I’m going to pose to the men. Guys: do you have any idea how immodest you have to be to talk about staring at women in public and thinking sexual thoughts about them?

Because this is not normal and healthy behavior, and outside of evangelical spaces, it’s simply not acceptable for men to act like this.

When I moved to start teaching and studying at a Methodist seminary and started attending mainline churches (around age 27, I think), I realized all of a sudden that the guys there had superpowers. They could see someone who they thought was hot, think "Woah, she's hot," and then just keep going with their day.

There was no conversation. No one had to stop and figure out why the lady was hot, what she was wearing that made her hot, and fret about how hot she was and how much this disrupted the man’s day and indeed his entire spiritual existence. No one then had to get all the women together and talk about what had just happened and then beg the women not to wear the clothes or do the thing that the man found so hot, in order to ensure that nothing like this would ever happen.

If you spend a lot of time in a culture where this is normal male behavior, it becomes invisible how much this is tragicomically absurd behavior, and is in fact deeply inappropriate and immodest on the part of the men who participate in it. No woman wants to hear a day-by-day report from men in her life about what they’re noticing sexually about her or other women. No one asked men for a status report on their experiences of eroticism lately. This is not invited behavior. This is not necessary behavior. This is simply not appropriate and is baptized sexual harassment.

This has been frustratingly reframed as frankness and authenticity, but as always, frankness in the church about sexuality is a right men tend to enjoy at the expense of women. In this case, it is an insistence on making men’s experiences of their own fetishes and their objectifying of other people a part of legitimate Christian discourse. But it’s not, and it shouldn’t be. This does not need to be a public conversation.

Self-control is not only internal (ie, not obsessing about a woman you see and who you find attractive). It’s also external (not talking about it later). I would suspect that as people practice the latter - not talking about women they find attractive even to complain about how frustrating it is - the former will become easier as well.